gerryk.com

In 1990, with the help of Steve EI5DD. I acquired my class B Ham Radio, or as they aretermed in Ireland, Radio Experimenters' license. Back then, B licensees were only permitted to operate in the VHF and UHF band allocations. This excluded us from the long distance world of HF communications, but I still was badly bitten by the radio bug.
As a member of the Galway VHF Group, I was involved in AREN operations which gave me some experience in accurate message handling and working as part of a group.
I then had a long hiatus from the hobby, and, after more than 15 years absence, reacquired my old callsign, EI8DRB, and was QRV once more. This time, however, a couple of important things had changed... one, I now had a decent income, a portion of which I could spend on radio toys, and two, as part of a worldwide drive to encourage more people into the hobby, CW (morse code) was no longer a requirement for access to the HF bands.